What do you think about when you're self-voting?

If we are honest people, when we self-vote, we might want to give ourselves as much value as we think that content is worth. But is it really worth that much? Our judgement is clouded. Let's say we could give ourselves 100 dollars as a 100% upvote for a 4-paragraph post. We would be tempted to do so, at the very least, even if it's not right. The problem with self-voting is the conflict of interest.

But most people are not naturally good-hearted. They are neutral. They tend to selfishness instead of "what's right". Conflict of interest is a much bigger problem here. And it grows even larger when it comes to those who are ill-inclined.

However, when we upvote someone else, we almost always upvote for less than we would like. Because we want to distribute our upvotes. We seek the best content that will net the most bang for our vote. Suddenly, networking comes into play. We are more likely to seek certain people who always write good content, people who have voted for us, people who are staking instead of selling.

We also search more aggressively for quality so that, by voting on soon-to-be popular content, we get more value from curation because of how shared curation works. After all, if we upvote something before all others do, we get a larger share of the curation rewards for that post. Now that's what curating is all about. The exact opposite of mindless self-voting.

I currently self-upvote my posts (not comments) and I will continue to do so unless the community decides against this practice. I am against it too, but since there are bad actors around, competing with them is more important at this moment. They'd just take over otherwise.